Secretary Biden? Don’t Bet on It

Joe Biden is reportedly being considered for Secretary of State in a Clinton administration:

Joe Biden is at the top of the internal short list Hillary Clinton’s transition team is preparing for her pick to be secretary of state, a source familiar with the planning tells POLITICO.

If Biden is on such a list, I doubt he is at the top of it, and my guess is that he wouldn’t be the nominee in any case. There are other likely choices, including Victoria Nuland, that would be a better fit with Clinton and would be even more likely to share her foreign policy priorities. Kelley Vlahos reported earlier this year on Nuland’s record:

Where will Victoria Nuland be after January? Nuland is one of Hillary Clinton’s protégés at the State Department, and she is also greatly admired by hardline Republicans. This suggests she would be easily approved by Congress as secretary of state or maybe even national-security adviser—which in turn suggests that her foreign-policy views deserve a closer look.

If Nuland can be considered a Clinton protege, Biden is more of a rival. During the first Obama term, Biden and Clinton were frequently on opposing sides of internal foreign policy debates, and in his 2015 announcement that he wouldn’t run for president Biden offered what I took to be a rebuke of Clinton’s more aggressive foreign policy positioning:

We have to accept the fact that we can’t solve all of the world’s problems. We can’t solve many of them alone.

The argument that we just have to do something when bad people do bad things isn’t good enough. It’s not a good enough reason for American intervention and to put our sons and daughters’ lives on the line, put them at risk.

Probably their most significant disagreement was over intervention in Libya: Clinton was a major supporter, and Biden saw no compelling reason for the U.S. to intervene. Biden has a fairly hawkish record over the last twenty years, but even he couldn’t see why the U.S. should get involved there. As recently as June, he was publicly claiming vindication for opposing an intervention that Clinton touts as “smart power at its best.” I don’t see why she would want Biden as her Secretary of State, and I definitely don’t see why he would want to serve in her administration.

9 Responses to Secretary Biden? Don’t Bet on It

It would be nice if Clinton somehow nominated Biden… it would be very nice indeed.

But no, I’m not counting on it. We’ll most likely be stuck with Victoria Nuland. 🙁

Indeed, Biden himself has already indicated that he’s not interested.

Then again, he did say he was not going to be Vice-President, only for Obama to name him as his running mate a few weeks later. Even Clinton said, shortly after leaving Foggy Bottom, that she would probably not run for President again! So you can’t take politicians at their word when they claim not to be interested in a position. It’s more often than not just a clever maneuver to gauge peoples’ reactions.

Like I said, we’ll most likely be stuck with Nuland. Until then, though, we can dream…

A neglected (so far as I can tell) aspect of this is that becoming Secretary of State would essentially be a demotion for Biden at this point. Who would want to go from being Vice-President to being a Cabinet member?

On the other hand, Biden represents continuity with the previous Democratic administration in a position that is arguably the most important in the Cabinet. Before he was a Vice President, he was a senator and congressman for decades, either chairing or being the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Nobody will take Biden lightly, because they know that he is one of the five most powerful members of his party, instead of just some academic or civil servant who might easily be replaced in the next term.

If he doesn’t want it, he doesn’t want it. But if he does, I feel certain that the job would be his.

I’d like Biden in the gig, but he’s said no. As pointed out above, he’s said no before.

Nuland wouldn’t be my first choice–and I’m not sure she’d be so easily confirmed. If nothing else, that nomination would set up an interesting fight between the traditional Right (which still regards Russia, and Putin in particular, with suspicion) and the alt-Right (which seems to view Vlad as a potential savior of Western Civilization, given his eagerness to crack the heads of bohemians and other groups the alt-Right is not fond of). It would also piss off the Sanders faction on the left.

Can’t blame Uncle Joe for trying to salvage a modicum of dignity. I’m thinking Lindsey Graham would be excellent alongside Hillary … he has no dignity to speak of, and they share a foreign policy vision of marching NATO to the doorstep of Moscow, baiting Russia into war in Syria, and fomenting chaos throughout the world.

No one is going to be easily confirmed without a Democratically controlled Senate unless they are all Republicans and even then, that would still likely be a fight. Biden would be an interesting choice, but unlikely at this point, given history and inclinations.